


Three days in a cage

by Victoriaazul



Category: Original Work
Genre: But I'm already brain damaged, Gen, So..., Solitary Confinement, a strange introspection, apparently staying in an empty room for 3 days causes brain damage, thought experiment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-02
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-15 07:22:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29804937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Victoriaazul/pseuds/Victoriaazul
Summary: A random thought experiment: What if I were kept in an empty white room for three days. An exploration of childhood, quiet rage, and the things we do in boredom.“I am not a hamster,” I thought. “I do not need to eat your food, I have better food and water than your pomegranates of Hades”" I am everything you are not, and emptiness cannot contain me "" I am Sisyphus on the hill. But this is my hill, my load, my world."
Kudos: 1





	Three days in a cage

Day 1

Hour 1

I enter. Panic is swelling in my chest, there is an uncomfortable knot in my stomach that goes by the name ‘terror’. My face is blank. They will not feel the satisfaction of seeing my fear. I calmly walk to the bed and sit down as the door locks with a loud click. I remind myself not to look. 

I stare at the wall, and took in my surroundings through my peripheral vision. Toilet, toilet paper, rice, milk, white vitamin tablets, table, water, bedsheet. Half a metre of walking space, not enough to dance.

No paper, no pen, no colours, no books, no piano. 

Okay. 

I close my eyes and dream. 

Hour 5

I got up and methodically examined my surroundings this time. Looking for cracks and secret entrances and weak points. If this were a test maybe they wanted to see if I will escape. My movements are measured. I let myself feel no disappointment nor fear when I fail to discover any path to freedom. The walls were solid, there were no pipes to be seen, and there were no ventilators. I wonder when I will run out of air. 

I move towards the table to open a packet of food. I eat it. One rice at a time. 

I crafted castles and ogres and morse code out of the macaronis and spaghetti. Then I dismantled them and sent them to an acidic doom. 

I put them back in order, and went back to bed. I open my eyes and stare into the lighted ceiling. I will blink first and I will lose, but I am determined to be the worst test subject of all time. 

Hour 20 

I wonder what time it is. I drift through dreams and memories and imaginings until I can no longer distinguish what comes from sleep and what comes from my own conscious mind. Always, always, there is that clinical white light. 

I traversed through the green lands of Beleriand, the holy light of the two trees, the ruined castles of the great British isles. I am Alice in Wonderland. I am Hamlet, exiled and vengeful. I am Caesar, powerful and untouchable, until I am not. I wander my way through the wide, busy metropolis streets with its disorienting white noise. There are faces walking past me, some I recognised. Some I didn’t. Some had no faces. There were like pancakes of pale pink meat, staring straight into my soul. What do you want from me? I wanted to scream. Where are you? Who are you? They brush past me in a blur, sometimes they walk right through me. But always, always, they are staring at me.

I think I’m home. 

There’s a metal door in front of me. It’s a pale pastel blue, the colour of childhood. I couldn’t turn the knob, and I had no key. I walked back a few steps and turned around. The narrow stairs behind me had changed, had disappeared. There is only a white wall there now. I ran towards the door, crashed into it with all the strength I could muster up. Again and again. I screamed and there was an echo. (There is only the echoes.) I pounded at the door with a trembling arm. 

“Open up!” 

“Open up damn it, I’m home! I’m home.” 

“please...I’m home…let me in..” 

The walls around me started flaking, paint chipping off bit by bit, and I could feel the void lying behind the disappearing wall-flakes. There was red starting to imprint on the door now. Red in the shape of a hand, I noticed with twisted satisfaction. And then I faded away. 

I’m standing in the middle of a crossroad. 

There is redwood under my feet, polished, pristine and perfect. Around me are wooden frames, simple and elegant. Thereare a dozen rooms around me. My rooms. From all the homes and houses and shelters I've occupied across my time stream. My planes of reality had crashed and courted each other to form this Stonehenge. I walk towards the earliest one. It was cozy in the shades of light brown, red and delicate greens. Amber light flowed through the windows. There are wardrobes taller than ancient trees, with elegant boxes on top lying impossibly out of reach. There’s a mirror on the vanity, and family pictures. I saw my face reflected there. It was stern and cold and deciphering. I raised an eyebrow at myself and bursted out an amused smile instead. It grew wider and wider, till I wasn’t sure if it were a real smile anymore. I shrugged it away.

There was a little crib tucked safely in the corner of the room. Blue blankets, and Mr snuffles sits there, head lying against the bar. I picked him up. There are vague sounds coming from outside of the room. Footsteps, a deep gentle voice that drifts in the periphery of dreamscope, hypnotic and safe. Soft clickings of plates and cutleries. I turn towards the door. And there it was, the crushing pale light, flickering. The pathway outside had changed, and stretched out to an endless corridor, with more doors and memories behind them. I left my comfort behind and went. 

Sometimes, I could hear the light, gentle notes of the flute, wifting in and out. Other times there were the repetitive drag of the same 4 chords being played over and over again. Some bright nursery songs overlap with sounds of crashing and breaking, or laughing tracks from the TV in the next room. Sometimes, there were soft lullabies - that lullaby - , and sometimes there was a horrible, delightful imitation of opera coming from far away - the kitchen, perhaps, wherever that is. Whenever that is. 

The dining room floor had morphed into checkers and chess - the black and white squares now a battle ground of strategy. Books were displaced. There was a book about a girl who could see ghosts lying on a piano in a room tens of thousands of miles away from where it’s supposed to be. Another childhood nursery rhyme is stuck between notebooks with tightly squibbled equations. I’m overcomed with a strange urge to return them to their rightful places, but I keep winding up in new places, and I never ended up in the same room twice. There was no return. And what monuments I brought with me only became more lost, more displaced. 

I left them behind too. 

There were always voices coming out the door. Familiar faded conversations, in hushed sibilance, rhythm like a lullaby, like the sea tides crashing in. Sometimes I try to call out. Most of the time I was greeted with the continued flow of sounds, ignorant of my loneliness, stubbornly playing like a tape recording. One time I got a reply, a twist of knobs, a hand outstretched. I almost ran to the door, prepared to tackle whoever was behind it. Then I was whisked away again, shapes and objects around me whirled like a tornado, disorienting and displacing. 

A few times I tried looking out the windows. There were snow blowing diagonally through the sky, cooling and milk white. I opened the panels and they fell on my hands, tinklishly and shyly, then melted into water, transparent and clear, and free of being. Through another open glass there was a tree obscuring my vision of anything beyond, there were yellow birds fluttering about, and a nest resting safe on a thick branch. Through another heavy bulk of curtains and tightly shut window there was a tycoon. Towering trees swayed back and forth, bending and revolting against howling wind and sheets of rain falling against a midnight sky. There was a moon outside, visible through the curtain of grey. It gleamed a silvery white, reaching, clawing, grasping. 

It grew bigger and bigger, and its light sharper and sharper, radiance like needles and rope, and they snaked around me, and lifted my feet off the ground, through the glass, and the bars, and the rain, and the darkness. 

And then I woke up. 

Hour 21

I folded the toilet paper into ships, and birds. Then I started folding them along random lines, hoping that I’ll create something along the way. 

Hour 26

I tore them all to shreds. Perfectly straight, rectangular shreds. I did it while reciting the plotlines and dialogues of all my favourite books in my head. I did not say them out loud. They will not hear me. My voice speaks not for them, nor my mind for their examination. 

Hour 36

I’ve finished 3 packets of noodles. Perhaps that was a mistake. I have a long while before I run out of food, but I wonder if they will be less interested in a dead subject than a live one. I liked my human consciousness just fine, it’s sustained me thus while. But in a few days I might be tempted to bet it against their curiosity. 

“I am not a hamster,” I thought. “I do not need to eat your food, I have better food and water than your pomegranates of Hades” 

Hour 48

Has it been days? I can’t tell anymore. Just like I can’t tell my wakings from my sleeping anymore. I gave up on decorum a while ago. Apparently my rhetoric on the ethics and efficiency of forced human experimentation was unmoving. There is a desperation choking in me. I tire of pretending. There is no point. Tears leak out unabashed. 

I pound the walls, I kick over the bed. Something fey and monstrous and human in me struck out with my flimsy limbs of bamboo. 

“Let me out!” I cry, “what do you want from me?” 

“I have nothing, I am nothing” 

‘Please...let me out, I just want to go home.” 

Hour 60

So they want neither my composed silence, nor my rage, nor my wild fear, nor my songs and stories, which I have spent the last 10 hours regalling. 

I had scrunched up in a corner of the disarrayed room, back against wall. Hand resting Casually on knees. I’m talking to myself now, or them. I suppose it’s not a sign of madness if I know I’m not alone.    
“So, do you want it chronologically, thematically, or alphabetically? “ I asked, waving around to no one in particular. 

And then I spoke, of anything and everything I could remember. Number games, school stories, all my lies and truths. I tried to describe colours, but it was difficult. I can’t seem to remember them anymore. My dreams are echoes of this place now, everything takes place here. I am here. I have always been here. I will always be here.

Pink, my hands were pink...or were they yellow...or were they just...white. Everything here is a shade of alabaster, including me. Even my hair is not black, but an altered grey, faded and bleached. Drained.

“And then Sarah said..he..she said, ….” I croaked in a low whisper, voice almost gone.

“Ugh, I can’t remember anymore” I rested my hand in my face, and struggled to remember how to breathe. 

Then I laid down on the cold stone ground, curled into a ball, and stayed there. For the first time in days, weeks? I slept without dreaming. 

Hour 68

I got up. I dunked rice in a bowl of milk and drank it in one go. It was delicious. 

At least I have taste. 

Time is a strange concept here, I’ve forgotten ‘was’, and gave up on ‘will’. In this ‘is’, I have a bed. I want to not have a bed, then I can say, I ‘used to’ have a bed. I mused nonsensically, incoherent in my confusion. 

I tore a hole in the bedsheet, and I started tearing apart the threads. 

Maybe I’ll weave it back. Maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll create a pattern. 

Then again I only have threads of white. 

Oh, nope, I’ve got an idea.

I ripped open the bandage from my leg, which I apparently over-exerted in a zealous attempt to embrace the door. Blood started oozing out. And I watched the red in fascination for a bit. 

What a mighty colour. Passionate and jarring and alive. It’s in me, I remind myself. I am blood and life and red. 

I am passion, and an angry and willful red. I am joyful, and loud, and excitement. Capital letters in obnoxious red. 

I stared. And after a while a gathered my strength to Stand up. 

“I am not nothing. I am red and so much more, and emptiness cannot contain me” I said. I knelt down, and put the bandage back on. I don’t need to dye my world with blood to remind me I am alive. I have nothing to prove to you, and nothing to prove to myself. I shut my eyes against the invasive light, and against its iron tug I pulled the threads of my life back together. 

I had a cat named Oreos, he died...

I loved ballet, and I unashamedly adored my pink tutu. 

Pink was gentle, graceful, warm...

Hour 72

I am Sisyphus on the hill. But this is my hill, my load, my world. 

You don’t belong here. 

Hour 73

The door opens. 

My head whipped up at the grating sound. My heart skips several beats, exuberant in joy. 

I walked out dignified, and shut the door behind me with a vengeance. 

I greet them with a triumphant smile.

  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> -(ah, the things you write when procrastinating from writing college essays.)


End file.
